MAR Ravenna: Facebook suspends museum profile for artistic nudity for a month

Here we go again: the Facebook algorithm considered pornographic content a work of art, a nude, and therefore suspended the official Facebook profile of a major museum venue for a month. It happened at the MAR in Ravenna, and only yesterday the page was able to resume its activity: in fact, the last post was dated May 26. The social profile of the well-known Ravenna museum announced the resumption yesterday, early afternoon, with a reflection: "Finally the MAR page has been restored by Facebook, but this long forced hiatus made us reflect on a much-debated issue: artistic censorship. Facebook’s algorithm recognized a photograph of a semi-nude by Paolo Roversi as pornographic. But this is not the first time that the social network has censored works of art, and the well-known critic of New York Magazine, Jerry Saltz, was also ’suspended’ by Fb for publishing an image of a Pompeii fresco in his profile; and what about Gustave Courbet’s famous painting Origine du monde? Unpublishable without being deemed scabrous and offensive! Cultural institutions use social networks for their promotion and accept an internal regulation..all right..but maybe it is time for the empire created by Mark Zuckerberg to revise the parameters that define what is offensive and harmful to the public by opening the door to artistic and cultural debate."

The page was censored because it featured a shot of Paolo Roversi, depicting a female nude, promoting the exhibition being held from October 10, 2020 to June 6, 2021 at the MAR Art Museum of the City of Ravenna entitled Paolo Roversi. Studio Luce, in which some three hundred photographs from the archive of fashion photographer Paolo Roversi were on display for a story about the constant search for pure and evanescent beauty among timeless women.

Evidently Facebook did not realize that this was an artistic nude and, deeming it scandalous as well as against the social media’s rules, forced the removal of the image and punished the museum page with a lengthy suspension.

“This censorship is beginning to take its toll and complicate the lives of cultural actors such as our museum [...] while violent and vulgar content continues to circulate freely on the web,” the MAR declares. There have been numerous requests for restoration sent to the social’s support service, with the involvement of the Ravenna Municipality’s Legal Department as well, but the museum had to wait a month before seeing its Facebook page restored, which is necessary for the social promotion of all its proposed activities.

We at Finestre sull’Arte also suffered Facebook censorship for publishing Caravaggio’s Amor vincit omnia, and a similar case happened to Lorenzo Bonoldi for the Camera degli Sposi in Mantua.

Image: Paolo Roversi, Kate, New York 1993 (for Harper’s Bazaar). Ph.Credit Paolo Roversi

MAR Ravenna: Facebook suspends museum profile for artistic nudity for a month

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